Telephone travel cards, also known as telephone credit cards, are issued by telephone companies to customers believed to be credit worthy. The cards enable the caller to place long distance calls over any phone and to charge the call to the account of the cardholder.
The primary drawback of the present credit-control systems used by telephone companies is that they rely on a month-long billing cycle; in effect, credit is extended to the caller each time a call is made, even if the caller's credit worthiness is far less than the total charges on his or her bill.
Large telephone companies have invested significant capital into large main frame computer systems that collect and read data from switching equipment at monthly intervals. Specifically, most data collected from switching equipment is stored on nine track tape media at the switching station; to process the data from a nine track tape, human intervention is required, i.e., phone company personnel must physically remove each nine track tape from the switching equipment station each month and insert the tape into a processing computer. Thus, the amount of charges to a given account number are not known until the end of a billing cycle.
Unfortunately, a customer who has no intention to pay can run up enormous charges in one month of calling. The credit of the individual can then be cut off, but significant financial damage to the telephone company may have already occurred by then. With hundreds or even thousands of fraudulent callers using a phone company's credit cards, month after month, severe damage to the financial health of a telephone company can result.
Clearly, monitoring of a customer's credit on a per call basis is needed. If credit monitoring on a per call basis could be achieved, the travel card account number of a caller whose credit has been exceeded could be invalidated immediately upon completion of a call that reduced the caller's available credit to zero.
Unfortunately, the large telephone companies that have invested so much capital in main frame computers reliant upon switching equipment and once a month retrieval of nine track tapes are somewhat muscle bound and lack the flexibility to convert to monitoring of credit card calls on a per call basis. However, there are hundreds of small, independent long distance telephone companies that could convert to credit monitoring on a per call basis if the technology to do so were available.
More importantly, the art neither teaches nor suggests how a per call credit-monitoring system could be built. The realization that per call monitoring is needed is an important inventive step, but reducing the invention to practice cannot be accomplished by available equipment or software, nor can existing equipment and software be aggregated to produce the needed system.
A credit monitoring system of interest is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,706,275 to Kamil. However, the Kamil system replaces software at the existing switching equipment station. For this reason, it would not be feasible from an economic standpoint for a telephone company to convert to the Kamil system. Therefore, a credit monitoring system is needed that is outside of the existing system, i.e., transparent to the existing system. If an outside monitoring system could be provided, then the existing switching equipment would not need to be scrapped.
Real time screen displays of charges as they accumulate during a customer's call are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,731,818 to Clark, Jr. et al., 3,784,793 to Ito et al., and an article in the 1984 volume of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers by Weinstein.